Social access in the workplace: are ethnographers gossips?

Carmel, Simon

doi:10.1177/0950017011407969

Cited by 27 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…Issues of social access (Carmel, 2011) arose especially when it came to locating key informants. Key informants were hard to access and the majority of them were eventually reached through personal network.…”

Section: Research Process and Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Skill as a relational construct: hiring practices from the standpoint of Chinese immigrant engineers in Canada

Shan

2013

Work, Employment and Society

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Under-employment and unemployment of immigrants has often been attributed to immigrants' lack of human capital skills and/or cultural and social capital endowments. Few studies have addressed the fact that despite these possible 'capital' disadvantages, immigrant niches are occasionally made in professional fields. Based on an institutional ethnographic study, this article sheds light on this phenomenon. Specifically, it traces some of the hiring practices found within the engineering profession in Canada from the standpoint of Chinese immigrant engineers. It unveils a hard versus soft skill discourse that ideologically relegates minoritized immigrants to the bottom of the hiring queue. It also maps a project-based and network-dependent hiring schema that paradoxically renders immigrants without 'desirable' skills simultaneously dismissible and indispensable. It further argues that the skill discourse revealed constitutes a rationalizing mechanism through which racialization and capitalist pursuit of maximum surplus value interact to produce differential opportunities for immigrants at different places and times.

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Section: Research Process and Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Skill as a relational construct: hiring practices from the standpoint of Chinese immigrant engineers in Canada

Shan

2013

Work, Employment and Society

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“…Short informal field interviews with instructors and students were conducted in connection with all observations. With rooting in an ongoing ethnographic project, the authors had prior understandings of the context under study and had previously established entry-level access and social access (i.e., Brapport^) with the student groups (Carmel 2011;Punch 1986), which facilitated the collection of spontaneous informant accounts through field interviews. Field interviews were conducted on-site directly before or after follow-up sessions (for example, during breaks and lunch) and revolved around evolving themes pertaining to the observed sessions or questions raised by the observer regarding interpretations of sessions.…”

Section: Data Sourcesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Stories of Policing: The Role of Storytelling in Police Students’ Sensemaking of Early Work-Based Experiences

Rantatalo

Karp

2017

Vocations and Learning

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Storytelling has been shown to play a key role in transferring work experience from more experienced towards novices in a number of vocational educational practices, however previous studies have not to the same extent dealt with the role of students' own storytelling practices for sensemaking of work experience. This study set out to examine police students' storytelling of their first occupational experiences from a sensemaking perspective, with an analysis drawing on the concepts of enactment, selection, and retention. The study is based on participant observations of field training follow up sessions' in the context of police education. Findings indicated that student storytelling of work experience tended to be geared towards action, extremeness and the telling of 'war stories'. Furthermore, these type of stories functioned to enable student identification, self-enhancement and emotion management. These findings contribute to our current understanding of how students engage in sensemaking of work-based experiences and in extension how knowledge integration and learning from work placements can be structured pedagogically.A longstanding theme in research on vocational education and training has been how work-based experiences for students can be integrated with learning in vocational and higher education programmes (Aarkrog 2005; Sappa and Aprea 2014; Stenström and Tynjälä 2009; Tynjälä 2013). As stated by Billett et al. (2013) and Billett (2009Billett ( , 2014, a central challenge for educational institutions that provide work-based student

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“…Researchers should consider appropriate attire (Delamont, 2002) Researchers may participate in off topic conversations, and even (with caution) local gossip, to be seen as part of the team (Carmel, 2011). Researchers may choose not to share their own views which contrast to dominant discourse in the setting (Molloy, 2015) Researchers may perform "emotion work" to present a neutral response to comments or activities that they find emotive (Blix & Wettergren, 2015).…”

Section: Macro Visibilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“I Don’t Want You Sitting Next to Me”

Grant

2017

International Journal of Qualitative Methods

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The challenges of access in ethnographic research are well-documented in methodological literature, but poorly described in many empirical studies. To date, very little research has focused on access to organizations. In this article, I describe the ongoing access challenges in a period of fieldwork in UK Jobcentre Plus (welfare) offices. Access was granted in four phases: organizational access at a national level (macro), access to individual offices (meso), access to advisors as interview subjects (very limited micro), and finally access to shadow one welfare advisor (limited micro). However, access to observe multiple advisors (full micro) did not occur. In this article, I draw on field notes and interview extracts from advisors as one source of ethnographic data and compare these to data generated in interviews with benefit claimants who were recruited from charities and interviewed away from Jobcentre Plus offices. Differences were found between these two data sources, which highlight that access arrangements impacted on the data collected. Researchers should acknowledge and reflect upon access arrangements at the macro-, meso-, and microlevel in the presentation of ethnographic research findings.

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Social access in the workplace: are ethnographers gossips?

Cited by 27 publications

References 20 publications

Skill as a relational construct: hiring practices from the standpoint of Chinese immigrant engineers in Canada

Skill as a relational construct: hiring practices from the standpoint of Chinese immigrant engineers in Canada

Stories of Policing: The Role of Storytelling in Police Students’ Sensemaking of Early Work-Based Experiences

“I Don’t Want You Sitting Next to Me”

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